as happy to gratify them. He made his only meal at her house--his
supper; for all his money was spent in clothes and his place in the
_Fenice_. He had also to pay a hundred francs a year as wages to his
father's old gondolier; and he, to serve him for that sum, had to live
exclusively on rice. Also he kept enough to take a cup of black coffee
every morning at Florian's to keep himself up till the evening in a
state of nervous excitement, and this habit, carried to excess, he hoped
would in due time kill him, as Vendramin relied on opium.

"And I am a prince!"

As he spoke the words, Emilio Memmi tossed Marco Vendramin's letter into
the lagoon without even reading it to the end, and it floated away like
a paper boat launched by a child.

"But Emilio," he went on to himself, "is but three and twenty. He is
a better man than Lord Wellington with the gout, than the paralyzed
Regent, than the epileptic royal family of Austria, than the King of
France----"

But as he thought of the King of France Emilio's brow was knit, his
ivory skin burned yellower, tears gathered in his black eyes and hung to
his long lashes; he raised a hand worthy to be painted by Titian to push
back his thick brown hair, and gazed again at Massimilla's gondola.

"And this insolent mockery of fate is carried even into my love affair,"
said he to himself. "My heart and imagination are full of precious
gifts; Massimilla will have none of them; she is a Florentine, and she
will throw me over. I have to sit by her side like ice, while her voice
and her looks fire me with heavenly sensations! As I watch her gondola a
few hundred feet away from my own I feel as if a hot iron were set on
my heart. An invisible fluid courses through my frame and scorches my
nerves, a cloud dims my sight, the air seems to me to glow as it did at
Rivalta when the sunlight came through a red silk blind, and I, without
her knowing it, could admire her lost in dreams, with her subtle smile
like that of Leonardo's Mona Lisa. Well, either my Highness will end
my days by a pistol-shot, or the heir of the Cane will follow old
Carmagnola's advice; we will be sailors, pirates; and it will be amusing
to see how long we can live without being hanged."

The Prince lighted another cigar, and watched the curls of smoke as the
wind wafted them away, as though he saw in their arabesques an echo of
this last thought.

In the distance he could now perceive the mauresque pinnacles that
crown